Eighty years ago this month, a couple driving through the Scottish Highlands spotted a whalelike creature cavorting in a vast, dark body of water. The local paper gave their account a few wry paragraphs under the headline "Strange Spectacle in Loch Ness."

It was the first reputed sighting of the Loch Ness Monster, a brute that has since been the subject of countless barroom debates, research expeditions and academic conferences. Scientists are decidedly skeptical about prehistoric survivors lurking in the deep, but one might meekly counter that at 22 miles long and 800 feet deep, Loch Ness is plenty big enough to conceal a plesiosaur-size mystery.

That's what I'd like to think, anyway. At a time when we're swimming in goofball delusions and bizarre conspiracy theories, it feels refreshing to keep a sliver of hope that something as charming as Nessie might actually exist.

I grew up in the '70s, a golden age of credulity when respectable adults embraced things like ESP and magic crystals, and I developed a hearty appetite for unexplained phenomena. I ran my fingers over many a Ouija board, dowsed for water in my backyard and even did my fifth-grade science fair project on pyramid power (my experiment, as I recall, concluded that placing a cardboard pyramid over a dish of room temperature milk actually did impede the growth of bacteria).

I was introduced to her by a great TV show called "In Search Of," hosted by Leonard Nimoy. The episode chronicled the summer of 1976, when research teams converged on the loch to track down the beast. A camera operated by the show's crew captured what Nimoy portentously called "the most convincing photographic evidence gathered this year that the monster may, in fact, be real" — a line of bubbles breaking on the surface.

"We now have volumes of data on the Loch Ness Monster," Nimoy said. "And none of the investigators involved disputes the probability that a creature lives in Loch Ness. And all of them agree that the intensive effort may soon turn up the monster of the lake."

I was sold. After that, I checked out every book I could find on Nessie and pored over every blurry image with the focus of a monk, convinced that those shadows and ripples revealed a prehistoric sea serpent that had somehow eluded capture.

Maybe it was just the natural outgrowth of a boyish love of dinosaurs, but I really wanted the Loch Ness Monster, above all other mysterious creatures, to be real. The thought of her slicing through the depths, revealing herself to no one but sightseers whose cameras never worked quite right, was too marvelous to doubt.

The '70s finally ended, though, and we became a harder and more cynical land just as I dropped my childhood naivete for a teenager's sarcasm and suspicion. Believing in hidden monsters became as absurd and outdated as a polyester leisure suit.

Here's the funny thing, though: It's not as if we suddenly became logical thinkers and strict devotees of the scientific method. A lot of us still believe in crazy things. They're just different things.

The American government was behind the 9/11 attacks. President Barack Obama was born in Kenya. The Sandy Hook massacre and the Boston Marathon bombing were hoaxes designed to scare us into surrendering our liberties.

Credit card purchases will never have to be settled. We can lose weight without eating less or exercising more. Those drunken, seminude selfies we post on Facebook will never come back to haunt us.

Compared to all of that, the idea of an overgrown eel skulking in a Scottish loch doesn't seem so loony, does it?

I was in my 20s when I finally made it to Loch Ness. My wife and I were driving around Scotland on our honeymoon and decided to stop by as a change of pace from all the castles and sheep and picturesque pubs. We wandered through a horrible tourist trap museum, complete with a fiberglass Nessie rising from a shallow pool, and for a moment I was sorry we came.

Then we spent a few minutes gazing over the calm, misty waters of the loch. I was pretty sure we weren't going to see anything. But something still prompted me to keep a finger hovering over the shutter button of my camera.